


Depth of Memory

by Leaf-Groot (Tavina)



Category: Dreaming of Sunshine - Silver Queen
Genre: 5+1 Format, Alternate Universe - Reincarnation, DoS: Further Reincarnation - After DoS Canon Shikako Is Reborn Into Warring Clans Era, Gen, Inuzuka Lore, Nara Shikako becomes Inuzuka Tsurugi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-18
Updated: 2020-04-18
Packaged: 2021-03-01 16:59:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,131
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23720464
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tavina/pseuds/Leaf-Groot
Summary: Or, five times Inuzuka Tsurugi remembers her past life, and the one time she understood it.
Relationships: Nara Shikako & OC
Comments: 13
Kudos: 268
Collections: Gen Freeform Exchange2020





	Depth of Memory

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mysticaltorque](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mysticaltorque/gifts).



“I also know how the old life haunts the new.”

— Mary Oliver, _Benjamin, Who Came From Who Knows Where_

* * *

She doesn’t remember it all at once. Not like last time. There was no great trauma a few months after birth, no twin brother by which to gauge her time, no hite-ate to recognize.

Instead, she remembers in flashes, deer and shadows, burning fields, torn down cities, an arm of shadow, a flash of blood and armies marching.

Needless to say, these were not happy dreams, memories flashing just out of reach.

This time, her name is Tsurugi, named for cranes with delicate legs, though there is nothing delicate about how sharp her new teeth are, her wild hair, and eyes so amber they’re almost half gold.

Years and years later, Nara Shikako dies on a battlefield, hailed a hero.

Years and years earlier, Inuzuka Tsurugi is born in the peak of summer, the youngest child of three.

And if the cycle of time turns, it turns for this.

* * *

The first time she remembers something, she is seven years old, and her second sister had taken her to Okami-sama’s shrine to light incense for the ceremony before spring planting.

The two of them walk up the dirt path, hand in hand, kicking up red dust in their wake.

“Uncle, Uncle!” Aneja raps her knuckles on the open shrine door. “We’re here to ask Okami-sama about the harvest!”

The shrine keeper and Speaker for the Dead is not necessarily their uncle, though close enough a relation that it really didn’t matter much.

Uncle Kozashi is a big man with laughing eyes. “Aha!” He appears from a side room in the shrine. “If it isn’t Fuji-chan and Rugi-ko.”

Aneja had been named for the sweet smelling wisteria, trailing down over their porch by Chichi, and of the three of them, the only one who doesn’t share his silver hair.

“Uncle!” Aneja protests, laughing. “I am turning seventeen this year. It’s Fujita now.”

The big man holds his hands up in surrender, laughing as well. “You win, you win, Fuji-hime.” Then he crouches down, elbows set loosely on his knees to look at Tsurugi. “And how are you today, Rugi-ko?”

Of all the uncles she had, she was the fondest of Uncle Kozashi who would ruffle her silver hair and squish her cheeks before feeding her brown sugar candy, or a few stalks of sugarcane.

“I get to join the planting,” she tells him, for the spring planting is a serious business for the entire clan.

“So you do!” Uncle Kozashi hands her a stick of incense for the shrine. “For this is a serious year, is it not?”

“Uh-huh,” she agrees. Joining spring planting meant that she was old enough for a _partner,_ like how Haha had Takamaru, and Aneja had Rumaru, and Uncle Kozashi had Shumaru, the largest, and most gentle of all the clans protectors.

The smoke from her stick of incense wafts up into the air, and she bows her head, tries to find words to send to Okami-sama, but suddenly —

As if flesh could burn with the stench of death, blood and battle flashed across her closed eyelids and she jolts upwards with a gasp. _Shika...ko._ Someone had begged for her with a name not her own. _Shika-ko please._

Only later does she recognize Uncle Kozashi’s hands on her shoulders, keeping her upright, hears the words he’s saying. “Don’t worry, Rugi-ko, don’t worry I’ve got you, you’re _safe._ ”

Only later does she recognize the scream that cried with a voice that was not her own seared across the back of her mind.

What grief this was, she did not know.

* * *

The second time she remembers, she is ten years old, picking up something for Haha at the potter’s, Ranmaru following at her heels. Her silver hair bounces in a long, loose braid.

Auntie Yuzu is throwing clay from the Naka River, humming a quiet song when she arrives. “Oh? Rugi-ko, did Mari-kogo send you to pick up the new set of plates?”

“Uh-huh.” She comes to stand behind Auntie Yuzu, watching the clay take shape under the older woman’s hands, first shallow, then deeper and deeper, as the clay thins and stretches in ways that could only be called art.

“They’re on the counter, Rugi-ko.” Auntie Yuzu pauses the wheel to turn to her. “Have you eaten yet?”

She’d been out in the fields all day, feet in the paddy mud, weeding the rice. “Not yet!”

Auntie Yuzu made the best sticky rice cakes for dessert, delicious stews and savory breads to go with it.

“Then stay a while, Rugi-ko.” Auntie Yuzu smiles. “Kiji should be back any moment now.”

She’s chopping carrots for Auntie Yuzu when it happens, her mind had gone elsewhere, thinking about when Chichi would be coming home from his trip to the lowlands below the mountains, if she has time to stop by Haruko-baa’s house tonight to make sure that she didn’t need anything, and she nicks her finger with the cutting knife by accident, blood pooling scarlet onto a half cut carrot.

Blood — blood and death and pinwheels spinning in the wind and again, a scream of pain and grief she could not understand. _Sasu...ke...it’s...alright to let go._

Red eyes.

Black pinwheels spinning.

Fire burning in the distance.

This time, she is no longer so sure that it was Okami-sama’s message of something or a portent of her future.

This time, she has to figure out what it means for herself.

“Rugi-ko!” Auntie Yuzu is there to bandage her finger, fretting all the while. “Rugi-ko, oh, do be careful, I should have been watching with more attention.”

“It’s okay, I was the one not paying attention.”

* * *

The third time she remembers, she is thirteen years old, already skilled with ninja wire and shuriken, able to trade thoughts with Ranmaru like they are two halves of the same whole, and it’s sparked by her grandfather coming to visit. Hatake Eishun sits down on the porch, trading good natured barbs with her chichi, who smiles in the morning sun, and her grandfather is an old man with a lined face, a curved scar cut in a weft just above his left eye.

Somehow, it hadn’t triggered before, but this morning she steps out onto the porch, braiding her silver hair as she walks — the only one of three sisters to keep it long — skipping because this is her _grandfather_ and Eishun-jiji always told the best stories.

She slightly misses the bottom step, and Jiji catches her by the arm, quick as lightning. “Easy there, Rugi-ko.”

And suddenly she remembers another man with white hair and sadness in his smile, one who called her _Shika-ko_ and —

This memory stings much more than either of the second two.

Had Shika-ko called this man she remembered Sensei? Was _she_ the Shika-ko these ghostly figures wanted to summon?

* * *

The fourth time she remembers, she is fifteen years old, and Jin-kun had already been training to be the next Speaker for four years, but today, they work in the fields together, reaping wheat with scythes in companionable silence.

At fifteen, she was still not apprenticed, though Auntie Yuzu had offered to teach her to mold clay, and Eishun-jiji had offered to take her out into the world with the Hatake trade caravans, a thought that had displeased Haha a great deal.

The argument from last night replays, over and over in her head as she thinks about it — their family had been sitting at the dinner table, Kime-neesan with her head bowed over a report from the northern lands in a fiercely whispered discussion with Aunt Asako, Fuji-neesan animatedly gesturing at Uncle Kotaro over the value of forge worked steel from Iron Country, and then Haha and Chichi arguing with Jiji.

 _She is my daughter, just fifteen years old. She is too young to go out into the world._ Even death touched, even a fearsome fighter, even just, she is her haha’s youngest child, the baby of their family, and that’s enough to make her mother bristle at the thought of letting her go.

Chichi had been silent then, perhaps thinking of his own life, which had started out there, in the lowlands, among war and bloodshed, and somehow ended up here, with wisteria trailing on the porch, high up in the mountains, where war did not touch.

“Hey, Rugi-ko?” Jin’s paused reaping. “I heard about what happened last night.”

“I think the whole clan’s heard about it,” she sighs, blowing a strand of silver hair out of her eyes. “Haha and Jiji rarely fight over anything.”

Last night, Jiji had turned to her. _Well, what does Rugi-ko think?_

And she could say nothing.

“You know, if you want to go, you can say so.” Jin sets a hand on her shoulder. “You’ve got a hunger to see what’s beyond the Villa, and there’s nothing wrong with that.”

“It would break Haha’s heart.” She’s swallowed down her questions, swallowed down the yes that she wanted to give Jiji because it wouldn’t be right.

“Not everyone is born to be content with the land, the turn of the seasons, and a handcraft, you know,” Jin says, and suddenly in the light his hair shines gold for just a moment. She blinks away the memory of a young man with golden hair and eyes the color of the sky — there was no one like that in the Villa, even though a voice in the back of her head whispers _Naruto._ “And that’s _okay._ That’s fine. I’m sure Mari-kogo would understand if you told her that you want to go.”

And that’s a choice, that’s a path she’ll have to decide to start down herself.

“Thanks, Jin.” She shrugs her braid over a shoulder, and the two of them go back to work in silence.

* * *

The fifth time she remembers, is when she’s sixteen and kneeling by Uncle Koza’s bedside, holding his cold hand in two of hers. Her knees have gone numb, Uncle Koza’s hand has gone stiff, but she doesn’t move.

The clan howls tonight, singing his song so that he could pass on, Jin leading the sorrow as he steps into the role of Speaker.

The clan howls, and she blinks away the tears that threaten to stream down her face, mourning a man who had only ever been just and right, lost to a disease that no one understood properly.

For someone who had seemed so big in her childhood, his body seemed small, shrunken in on itself in death.

His last words still ring in her ears, _wolf-heart, did you know what Okami-sama said when you were born?_

He never did tell her what Okami-sama said.

Deer heart, deer/wolf/bravehearted girl

shadow/moonlight/youngest/sister/brother/twin/child

friend/teammate/family/seven/loss/sugar cane/leaves

war/peace/something lost/gained

And for the first time, Rugi-ko and Shika-ko meet face to face, yin and yang, dark and light, war and peace.

* * *

By the time she is seventeen, she’s had more memories crop up than she can remember, memories of war, and blood, and death, but also memories of sunlight, clouds, and smiling faces.

By the time she is seventeen, she is determined to go out and see the world for herself, what sort of life had inspired this sort of half trance.

She swings a pack over her shoulder under the light of the full moon, incense before Okami-sama and Yasuka-sama’s shrine burning in her nose, Ranmaru by her side.

She looks up once at the likeness of the woman who had founded the clan.

_Daughter. Sister. Mother. Wife._

_Demi-goddess. Mortal. Woman. Empress._

An elder sister with dark hair, carrying her brother down this mountain as the sky rained fire when she was no more than a child.

Inuzuka Tsurugi does not follow her foremother’s footsteps today because she has a brother to save, but because there is a world out there to see. _Forgive me, Haha, I want to know what these memories mean._

“Are you ready, girl?” She pauses at the shrine door for Ranmaru, who trots out the door with her, and then further down the street until they come to the very edge of the villa.

Another step, and further down, she leaves the mountain behind her, nothing remaining of childhood except the red dust clinging to her hair and the dog at her heels.

* * *

Half a year later, she looks straight ahead into the red eyes of Senju Tobirama, and the first word that comes to her lips is “ _Sasuke.”_

And suddenly everything slams into focus when the first thing he says after a dumbfounded silence is “ _Shikako._ ”

* * *

“She. Silent, fawn-eyed. Clever.”

— Slyvia Plath, _“Stone Boy with Dolphin”_

**Author's Note:**

> I hope this was a fun read!


End file.
